Can Alchemy Sustain Us?
by queenofnoise
Summary: Weeks after Sam returns to Grace, he decides to put his newfound humanity - and Graces cure - to the test. Oneshot.


**Author's Note: **A short, unedited one shot written while waiting for dinner to defrost a few weeks ago. Title inspired by lyrics from the song _The Alchemy Between Us_ by Young Galaxy.

**Can Alchemy Sustain Us?**

His chest is glacial beneath the warmth of her handprints, like her small fingers bearing her weight are pressed into the snow blanketed earth and not inches from his erratic, fractured heart. The ghostly remnants of fallen snowflakes are scattered across his outstretched body; glints of reflected starlight in his midnight hair, drops of melt-water spotted across the grey cotton of his shirt and small renegade flakes that cling to the lashes around his yellow eyes. The exposed skin under her palms is colder than they have ever allowed it to become since he shook off the wolf in him and tossed it aside like it was nothing but an old coat that he had outgrown and wished to forget.

He hasn't shifted in weeks, but the possibility of it still frightens her. This unprecedented carelessness regarding his safety disrupts her, and she can't help it when the nervous sound that escapes her is his name, followed by an earnest _'__please'_. Her body can only keep his so warm in the bitter night. His voice is no more certain than hers when he asks her, rather unconvincingly, to trust the cure. _Her cure_, he reminds her, feigning confidence.

The falter in his words and crack in his tone tell her she'll have to believe enough for the two of them. The worry sets its roots in the pit of her anxious stomach, his plea for faith doing nothing to assuage her fears, but his cool fingers find her mouth in the darkness, and press against her lips.

'Grace, trust me.'

She does. Implicitly.

He lifts his fingers slightly then, traces the line where the swollen pink of her bitten lips drifts to the pale skin of her cheek and back again, a gentle and attentive touch. He reaches out his other hand, brushing a stray tendril of golden hair from her eyes, letting the moonlight hit her face through the pillars of trees. She appears like a ghost in the night, crouched above him, barely illuminated but undoubtedly real.

His pallid skin is still achingly cool against hers; the snow stings her bare knees where they lie on either side of his hips, and she wonders briefly how long he had been lying here before she found him. Grace slips her fingers between those of his that lie against her flushed cheeks and clumsily tangles their hands together, one pressed against her furious heart, crushed between them, the other raised close to her parted lips. She brushes kisses against his dew covered palm, pouring all her affection for him into the action; eyes shut forcibly against the assaulting waves of memories of days spent without him. She blocks it all out, pretending as if that pain had never existed.

She forgets that he was once wolf and that she should be wolf and focuses instead on how utterly _human_ this moment is.

Her laboured breath warms his skin quickly and, realizing this to be her intention, Sam rolls silently to his side. Clutching her body to his, legs between legs and arms hooked in arms, he watches as her lips pass over the garish white scars that curve across his wrist and carve into the skin. Her lips only barely graze the old cuts there, as if the wounds are still fresh and not long since healed, and she trembles slightly, a tremor that shakes his fist in hers, though it is not the cold that bites incessantly at her bones and chills her blood to frost under her snow dusted skin. Her fingers leave his to grasp at the few unopened buttons of his drenched shirt, but the numbness seeping under her fingernails hinders her dexterity. Sam laughs low, the sound almost feral, and removes her hands from their vice grip to hold above her head, pinning her easily.

They both are startlingly aware of the fragility of this moment, how delicate this could be, though Grace is the only one who seems to care. And once his lips are on hers again, a melting of flames against ice and soft skin against sharp teeth that shakes her chest and rattles her heart in her ribcage, she can't even remember why. All she knows is him; the feel of his lips crushing and demanding against hers, the taste of salt and scent of earth against his skin and the warmth between their bodies, folded together against the wind. Even as she hears the unmistakeable cry of wolves in the distance, and feels the chill creep into her now naked body, she can only comprehend the pleasure of his hips against hers and the tingling of his breath in her ear. She whimpers his name, and he says hers as a prayer, and they know this is for certain.

Over his shoulder, she watches the constellations turn against the night sky and slip out of sight from where they are fenced in by the forest, the glittering clusters of stars watching as she falls into a restful asleep against his skin; cold, shaking and scarred ...and irrefutably human.


End file.
